Monthly Archives: March 2017

In an indefinite future, cybernetic enhancements have become a growing trend. On the forefront of this advancement is Major (Scarlett Johansson), a human mind placed into a robotic shell. To some, the perfect weapon.

The Dark Tapes is an independent found footage horror anthology. It is a film in the same family as the V/H/S films, The ABCs of Death, and the recent XX. The difference between those films and this is that, while other anthology films split its work among multiple directors who each take on a self-contained short, The Dark Tapes is a film written by one screenwriter (Michael McQuown, who also shares directorial credit with Vincent Guastini).

As such, the frame narrative should share some cohesion across the film. The immediate impression, thus, is that the various “chapters” bleed together. Glitches transition between the shorts on the “tape.”

Then there’s Valerian and the City of Long Movie Titles. Oh, that’s a comic book adaptation? At least it looks pretty.

Luc Besson (“legendary director,” according to some marketing campaigns) has a new film coming out this year. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (do the 1,000 planets have cities? do those cities have planets inside of them? we may never know).

Besson is best known for a great crime film, The Professional, and a slightly over-rated, imaginative science fiction cult hit The Fifth Element. He also made Lucy, but let’s not talk about it.

Valerian looks like a spiritual sequel to The Fifth Element. The new trailer for the film, admittedly, looks quite beautiful on a computer generated level.

A family of three move into a quaint rural home that was once the site of a double homicide, perpetrated at the hands of a man (Pruitt Taylor Vince) who hears the voice of the devil in his head.

Jesse Hellman (Ethan Embry), father and husband, is a contract painter and metalhead. He’s a young-at-heart, hippie-looking pot smoker who hates painting flowers for banks. And he also picked the wrong house to move into.

CHiPs. California Highway Patrol. Also, an ’80s television show starring Erik Estrada that is no longer culturally relevant.

There is not much to say about CHiPs, so I will try and keep this short. For a silly reboot comedy, this film about two motorcycle police officers goes dark in weird atonal ways. Heroin, sex addiction, and suicide are all introduced as plot devices within the first 10 minutes of the film.

On the International Space Station, a similarly international skeleton crew of astronauts receive a crucial sample from the surface of Mars. What they find in it, however, is more than merely sand and sediment deposits.